Budding entrepreneurs have another resource on campus, allowing them to try their hands at emerging technology.

The Fusion Center of Innovation was recently created to encourage student innovation and entrepreneurship through the use of technology provided by the company Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, and additional resources from the University’s Technology Entrepreneur Center, or TEC, and IllinoisVENTURES.

“It is more of a concept than a place,” said Andrew Singer, director at TEC and professor in electrical and computer engineering.

To inaugurate the center, the College of Engineering and TEC is offering a course that aims to teach students about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. AMD will provide guest lecturers who will cover some of AMD’s new technology as well as teaching students how to commercialize their creations.

“The idea is to get students who are interested in programming to learn a bit about different programming platforms (and) learn a little bit about entrepreneurship,” Singer said. “You can think of it as a concept that is part course, part incubator, part technology innovation.”

This is the first center of its kind for AMD and the University.

“AMD sees the University of Illinois as an ideal location in terms of the talent, faculty, students (and) resources that are available, so it seemed a natural fit for what they were looking to do,” Singer said. “It also helps that their CEO is an alumni.”

Rob Schultz, senior director of IllinoisVENTURES, said the technology investment firm has funded about 60 startup companies from the University over the past eight years. Schultz said that through this partnership, IllinoisVENTURES hopes to fund ideas that come from the fusion center for years to come.

“I think this is a good partnership with the industry to bring new technology to University students to spur innovation,” Schultz said.

AMD has stocked a classroom on campus in the Coordinated Science Laboratory with its equipment so that students enrolled in the course may work there and explore ways to take advantage of their Accelerated Processing Unit technology and platforms. The center wants to help unite the inventive minds of students with their new heterogeneous computing technology.

Ray Schuder, managing director of the AMD Fusion Centers of Innovation, said there are a lot of existing relationships between AMD and the research community at the University. Schuder called the University a leader in parallel computing, which he said made this school a perfect location to launch this program. AMD hopes to expand the project and create more centers at universities across the nation and world.

“I think it’s really about the commercialization of technology, new venture creation, understanding what’s possible in the world of computing today in this era of heterogeneous compute,” he said. “We want to make students aware of the tools that are available and the possibilities that exist and inspire a new generation of engineers coming into the work force. I think it is going to be a great partnership.”